guitarzan
Premium
join:2004-05-04
Skytop, PA
 ·epix
| reply to RadioDoc
Re: Quarter millon homes? That's it?
»www.qrpis.org/~k3ng/bpl.html
»www.gobpl.com/
Q: Why won't BPL be economical in rural areas?
A: Let's do the math for 10 people per mile of powerline with BPL...
Assume:
CPE cost: $500 each
Repeaters: $1K each
Customer Take Rate: 30%
Backhaul cost: $1k per month (a T1)
Repeater distance: 600 feet
Feedpoint cost/misc routing equip: $5k
Revenue per customer per month: $40
So:
Number of repeaters needed: 8
Number of customers: 3
Nonrecurring cost: $14.5k
Nonrecurring costs over two years: $604 per month
Recurring Cost: $1k per month
Revenue: $120 per month
It's easy to see that rural BPL isn't profitable.
Q: Won't BPL be different than Cable and DSL and deliver broadband to those who don't have it, especially in rural areas?
A: If you don't have broadband now, there's probably one good reason - lack of sufficient revenue in your area. People are mistaken in thinking that BPL providers are going to go out of their way to deliver BPL to country folk, as if this is some kind of humanitarian effort to get the country on the 'net. It's not.
Companies are in business to make a profit, plain and simple. Being a good corporate citizen in a community makes great press releases, but such efforts stop when the bottom line is affected.
Let's talk about the differences and similarities between Cable, DSL, and BPL for a moment. Cable requires a unit at the origination of the cable system, also known as a headend. This unit is expensive, but can service hundreds to thousands of customers.
The cable system is already built with repeaters for the video part of the system called amplifiers. So the major investment for cable is at the headend, and service can be delivered basically anywhere cable already is deployed. The upstream Internet network must be brought to a single point, the cable headend.
DSL is based out of telephone central offices using a device or peripheral called a DSLAM. Like a cable modem headend unit, it can provide service to hundreds of customers. DSL service can be provided about 18,000 feet from the DSLAM. This has severely limited DSL deployment. As with cable, the upstream Internet network must be brought to a single point, the central office. Any ILEC or CLEC probably already has significant Internet bandwidth available at any central office serving business customers.
BPL service is provided by a DSLAM/Cable headend type device, but its effective distance is 200 meters or 656 feet. Every 200 meters a repeater must be used to regenerate the signal. BPL service can't really be distributed from a central point like Cable or DSL, so the upstream Internet network must be backhauled to each BPL feed point via telco facilities such as fiber or copper.
So to deploy BPL an up front investment must be made in BPL headend/feed point equipment and repeaters. There's going to be significant recurring costs in backhauling the IP traffic from the numerous BPL feedpoints serving an area. Neither DSL or Cable has this recurring cost or need for multiple network origination points.
These costs unique to BPL make it even less attractive for deployment in rural areas that Cable or DSL as customer densities and revenue potential is lower. While it may be stated by BPL providers that initial metropolitan buildouts are needed to subsidize rural deployments, why would any for-profit company expand into rural areas when it's a losing proposition?
Q: Why don't the utilities just bury all the power lines to lessen interference?
A: If digging up the entire country for power line burial would be an option, it would make better sense to just run buried fiber everywhere. Fiber has so much, much more bandwidth compared to BPL it would be frivolous to go through such a drastic project just to bury cabling that can ideally carry only 100 kHz of bandwidth
BPL is one hellova pipe dream.Google I'm ashamed of you  |
